Biographical Sketch:

Melanie Mitchell is Professor of Computer Science at Portland State
University, and External Professor and Member of the Science Board at
the Santa Fe Institute. She attended Brown University, where she
majored in mathematics and did research in astronomy, and the
University of Michigan, where she received a Ph.D. in computer
science, Her dissertation, in collaboration with her advisor Douglas
Hofstadter, was the development of Copycat, a computer program that
makes analogies. She has held faculty or professional positions at
the University of Michigan, the Santa Fe Institute, Los Alamos
National Laboratory, the OGI School of Science and Engineering, and
Portland State University. She is the author or editor of five books
and over 80 scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence,
cognitive science, and complex systems. Her most recent
book,
Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford, 2009), won the 2010 Phi Beta
Kappa Science Book Award. It was also named by Amazon.com as one of
the ten best science books of 2009, and was longlisted for the Royal
Society's 2010 book prize. Melanie originated the Santa Fe Institute's
Complexity Explorer project, which offers online courses and other
educational resources related to the field of complex systems.